My husband Bill is noise sensitive. Sounds of traffic, noise from factories, lawn equipment and machinery drive him batsy. I, on the other hand, having spent many years in a cloistered monastery on a busy urban street am not bothered by noise. Bill will ask me if I hear a particular humming emanating from the rocks on which our house is built. I don’t, not until he’s pointed it out.
The well-known Jesuit and spiritual writer Anthony de Mello, in Sadhana, A Way to God: Christian Exercises in Eastern Form, addresses the issue of noise sensitivity during meditation. His Contemplation Groups often complain about the sounds around them, he writes, which intrude on their quiet and distract them. Rather than protect them from sound, he deliberately chooses places above or near busy streets.
“If you learn to take all the sounds that surround you into your contemplation,” he writes,”you will discover that there is a deep silence in the heart of all sounds.”
Modern life is noisy. No place is really free of noise as even the airwaves hum with electromagnetic and seismic signals. If we are to meditate (or simply to live in peace with noise) we must learn to find the “silence in the heart of all sounds.”
De Mello claims that sounds distract us when we attempt to run away or fight them. Rather than trying to tune out such sounds, he advises us to listen to the sounds surrounding us, even the smallest; to attempt to discover the sound within sound, the variations in pitch and intensity. In this way we become aware, "not so much of the sounds around you, as of your act of hearing."
Alternating between the awareness of sound to the awareness of your hearing can lead to the awareness that sound is produced and sustained by God’s almighty power. “God is sounding all around you . . . Rest in this world of sounds . . . Rest in God.”
If sounds bother you, or you want to improve your awareness during meditation, why not give de Mello's technique a try and see if it works for you?
The photo above is of an open courtyard off a busy San Juan street
Beryl is the award-winning author ofThe Scent of God: A Memoir, published by Counterpoint NY in hardcover 2006 and in paperback in 2007. Her work has been published in regional and national media and in the anthologies Surviving Ophelia(Perseus Press NY 2001) and the New Writer’s Handbook, Volume 2 (Scarletta Press 2008). Besides blogging on Gather.com, Beryl writes a travel blog, Road Writer. This essay is adapted from a recent post on her Spirituality blog, Finding Time For God,
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Comments: 46
Amazing paradox, my grandson -a teenager, who is so sensitive to sound that we almost had to sound-proof his nursery to get him to sleep when he was little, can not study now unless he's listening to music that is blasting away. Go figure.
Hugs and blessings - S.
For a quick escape, all I really need to do is take out my hearing aids.
My first 45 years I lived without much hearing, and then discovering hearing aids - they were an incredible distraction. After five years with them, when the batteries in them go out, I rush back into the silence unwillingly.
Silence is a buffer between me and the world. I didn't realize how left out I had always been. I have a pair of batteries in my pocket almost always.
Noise is amazing. The first time I heard a leaf skittering along concrete I stopped in amazement.
It took my long time co-workers a few years to recognize that I was now apart of their world, not some non-responsive hulk moving alongside them. It's sweet, they get as frustated as I when I forget to wear them - which is increasingly rare. I will drive back home to get them now.
Sounds are wonderful.
Featured in the Triple Name Club.
The other day I was surprised that the wind in the palms and pines outside my terrace sounded like gravel sliding down a hundred hills. I actually posted that one on twitter.
your post made me think of two things:
there is stillness at the heart of music, and I think one has to find that to make music well.
and, are you familiar with the music of Catriona MacKay? she plays the pedal harp, and for one of her compositions has included recordings of the sounds (wood being sawn, hammering, etc) of her harp being built woven into the melodies she plays on it.
okay, and a third thing -- how do you find being on twitter fits in with silence and distraction?
As a New Yorker I loved the sounds of the city: horns blowing, trains screeching, steam rising sounds out of grated holes in the ground, whistles blowing, busses, all of it I loved.
Now I hear crickets sparking their legs together, bees buzzing, cardinals chirping, scrub jays squawking, woodpeckers, sand hill cranes making guttural cries, cows mooing, chickens waking me up every morning, and sometimes like today, large claps of thunder. Welcome to central Florida.
I have acute hearing, and very sensitive to sound. I learned meditation years ago, able to block out New Years Eve on Times Square. I learned to hear peace within my Being. So I guess I've had the best of two worlds.
Thanks Beryl, and Beryl's husband.
This is a fascinating subject. I'm not bothered by surrounding sound when I contemplate or meditate. Buzzing thoughts are far more of a distraction for me ... until my mind sinks beneath them. Then thoughts are more like ripples on the surface that I am aware of but dismiss.
Okay I can live with that. But where I feel truly assaulted is to go to a supermarket and hear some kind of repetitive rock noise coming from the loud-speakers over head.I raarely go out to certain restaurants, if I can avoid them, because of the loud noise which passes for music. When clothing stores turn up the music, I go to the cashier and explain why I can't stop to buy whatever garment I am holding.
For meditation, I go to the woods and walk for miles along old logging roads.
I think I will take your advice and study what Anthony de Mello has to say. Thank you.
In just a few short paragraphs you have thoroughly re-aquainted me with my sense of hearing, or lack thereof, Beryl, and I thank you for it.
I have practiced Vipassana meditation off and on for a couple of decades, which rather than focusing attention to a single point, diffuses it to attend to all the senses. When I've meditated this way attempting to take in all phenomena in my immediate surround through the senses fully at once, I've always noticed that I hear a sort of deep sound below all the sounds after awhile. This is the closest I've come to the ' silence' within sound that you suggest we attend, following de Mello's insight. I'll search further, my dear.
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I so much enjoy every post of yours on Gather, Beryl.
David's response about the hearing aids reminded me of the first time Bill had heard birds in many years with his new hearing aids in place. He was astounded and delighted.
I enjoy stillness in many forms - others and myself, so I related to your post.
I hope you don't mind, I have printed this out to read to our meditation group this wek.
Lloyd
And I was also blown away with d.g.'s skittering leaf - wow - what poetry to be found there.
It sounds cliche, but there's a lot to be said for listening to the sound of silence.